Hanna Liden and Nate Lowman



Artists Hanna Liden and Nate Lowman have been inseparable for the last ten years, spending nearly every day and night together, so the fact that the friendship finally culminated in a collaborative exhibition came as a surprise to no one. Their show Come as You Are Again at Salon 94 in New York has just been extended until 31 January.

Hanna is most known for her series of masked figures in various states of undress who seem caught in the act of haunting the Swedish countryside. But for their show at Salon 94’s grand Upper East Side gallery, it is Nate who seems to relish the macabre — displaying, among other works, painted reproductions of gravesites and piles of bodies that recall Warhol’s early death and disaster series. Hanna’s nearby grid of photographic self-portraits — her head covered with upside down Have a Nice Day plastic bags — echoes a theme that’s well-known to any follower of Nate’s work; he’s been incorporating the bag’s ubiquitous smiling face into his art for years. Though there is a pleasant symmetry to the friends’ trading and mirroring of motifs, only two of the pieces in the show were made collaboratively: a gaping collage of burnt receipts called Swiped and an oil stick painting, Untitled (The Optimist), which began as a drawing the pair made in a restaurant on a paper table cloth.

AnOther caught up with Nate and Hanna in New York to find out how exactly their collaboration works, and what makes each of them tick.

What does your collaboration provide you that other relationships can’t?
Nate: For the most part, the paintings and photographs were made for the sake of conversation. We wanted to see how a painting could talk to a photograph in an intimate situation. Jeanne Greenberg seems equally dedicated to both mediums and has Salon 94 in her home, so we proposed the idea to her.
Hanna: The show at Salon 94 is not so much a collaboration as it is a dialogue. It's an ongoing thing. We always have that. This time it is a show.

Describe your lifestyle – how you live, how you work, and how you negotiate between the two. What is a typical day like?
Hanna: I live in Chelsea and have a studio in Chinatown. I get up at 7:30 a.m., e-mail and read the paper, then walk or bike to the studio. My amazing assistant Tyler comes in at noon. I work all day. Between 8 p.m. and midnight, I go to Nate's studio in Tribeca and hang out, or I have dinner with Nate at Odeon. Then I go home and sleep.
Nate: I live a series of binges; working, drinking.... there isn't much regularity except that Hanna is usually there.

In your artistic practice, are there people or modes of working that you model yourselves after?
Nate: Making art is such a particular thing to do. To inhabit some one else's approach would make you crazy. That said, I'm probably influenced in some way by every artist I meet.

What do you have in common?
Hanna: Location, time and obsession with specific but slightly different aesthetics, and mundane, but really important, details.
Nate: The biggest difference between us is that she has a vagina and I have a penis.

What are you each working on at the moment?
Nate: I just finished a collaborative show with Rob Pruitt about bed bugs at Gavin Brown's Enterprise. Bed bugs are a fact that is occupying New York City. I think people talk about them almost as much as they talk about real estate. Rob and I made all of the pieces together, which was really fun.
Hanna: I’m working on a show at Maccarone in March. Mostly sculpture. It’s going to be T-shirts, deli bags, ghosts and some other stuff.

Come As You Are Again at Salon 94, New York runs until 31 January.

Text by Julie Cirelli

Julie Cirelli is a writer and editor from New York, now based in Paris. She regularly contributes to V Magazine, Dossier Journal and S Magazine, among others.